I kinda love deploying servers. Really I do. It’s one of the consistent parts of my job as Sysadmin over the years and generally it has resulted in great amounts of satisfaction. As a technical evangelist, I still get to deploy them all the time in Azure for various tests and a projects. Of course, one of the duller parts of the process is software installation. No one really enjoys watching progress bars advance, when really you want to get to the more useful “configuration” part of whatever you are planning.
Not that long ago, Sysadmins utilized a not quite magical process of imaging machines to speed this up. The process still required a lot of waiting. If one was doing desktop deployments, the process was only made slightly more bearable by looking at the family photos and other trinkets left on people’s desks. Depending on the year one might have been working, this imaging process was also known by the brand name of a popular software – “ghosting.” If you look up the definition of imaging or ghosting in the dictionary, you’d find that it basically meant spending hours installing and capturing the perfect combination of software only to find one or more packages out of date the next time the image is used.
At any rate, fast forward to now and for the most part, we still have to install software on our servers to make them useful. And without a doubt, there will always be another software update. But at least we have a few ways of attempting to make the software installation part of the process a little less tedious.
I’ve been working on a project where I’ve been tackling that problem with a combination of tools for deployment of a “mostly ready to go” server in Azure. The goal was to provide a single server to improve the deployment process for small gaming shops – in particular, allow for the building of a game to be triggered from a commit on GitHub. Once built, Jenkins can be configured to copy the build artifacts to a storage location for access. For our project, we worked with the following software requirements to support a Windows game, but there is nothing stopping you from taking this project and customizing it to your own needs.
- Windows Server with Visual Studio
- Jenkins
- Unity
- Git
I’m a big fan of ARM Template deployments into Azure, since they can be easily kicked off using the Azure CLI or PowerShell. So I created a basic template that would deploy a simple network with the default Jenkins port open, a storage account and VM. The VM would use an Azure supplied image that already include the current version of Visual Studio Community. (Gotcha: Before deploying the ARM template, confirm that the Azure image specified in the template is still available. As new versions of Visual Studio are released, the image names can change.)
The template also takes advantage of the DSC extension to call a DSC configuration file to install the additional software and make some basic OS configuration changes. The DSC extension call the package from our GitHub repo, so if you plan to customize this deployment for yourself, you may want to clone our repo as a starting point.
You can find our working repo here and the documentation is a work in progress at the moment. The key files for this deployment are:
- BuildServerDSCconfig.ps1.zip
- StartHere.ps1
- buildserverdeploy.json
Use the StartHere.ps1 PowerShell file to connect to your Azure account, set your subscription details, create a destination resource group and deploy the template. If you are more an Azure CLI type of person, there are equivalent commands for that as well.
Once you deploy the buildserverdeploy.json template, the BuildServerDSCconfig.ps1.zip is automatically called to do the additional software installations. Because the additional software packages come from a variety of vendors, the DSC configuration first installs Chocolatey and then installs the community maintained versions of Jenkins, Unity and Git. (Creating the DSC configuration package with the BuildServerDSCconfig.ps1 is another topic, stay tuned.)
Once the deployment is complete, all that remains is for the final configuration to be set up to meet the needs of the developers. This includes connecting to the proper GitHub repo, providing the necessary Unity credentials and licensing and creating the deployment steps in Jenkins.
Congrats! You’ve now created an automated CI/CD server to improve your development process.
TECHBUNNY 